Gin dropped her suitcase to the porch with a loud sigh, fished in the rusty mailbox to no avail, and fumbled with her key at the lock. The door swung open at her touch. She stared at Flo, who was garbed in the green kimono that was signal of a rest-day, and who stared back in gloomy impassivity. Her lips were puffed and her eyes were red.
“Hello!” cried Gin. “Why are you here?”
“Well, guess.” Flo shuffled over to the sofa and a pile of stockings that needed darning. “I got up early this morning and went down to the office, all ready and waiting. I’ve been packed for two days, I was so excited.”
“I know.”
“Well, the cars all lined up and everybody came except three of my dudes. They were a family. I guess they just decided not to come, without any notice. It was so late that Mr. God just put the other one into Rita’s car instead, and they sent her, and told me to go home. That means the third year running that I’ve missed out on the Hopi country.”
“Oh, you poor thing!” In all Gin’s rush of indignation she was afraid to say more. With her mouth open, waiting to pour forth incitement to rebellion, she looked at Flo’s miserable face and turned instead to her suit-case. The purple velvet blouse went into the rickety wardrobe, but after a quick survey of the rest of the contents she closed the bag and pushed it into the corner, ready for tomorrow.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” she added over her shoulder, draping her suit-coat on a hanger.
“Oh, well,” said Flo heavily, “I’ll be over all this by tomorrow, I suppose. I’ve been as sore as this before. I’m just mad because I turned down a date for tomorrow night and now I’ll be in town after all, probably.”
“It’s a rotten deal. Call up and say your plans have changed. Where are the cigarettes?”
“On the table behind you. No, I’m not going to call up now. I’m ashamed to do it; I talked too much about the Hopi trip. I might as well give up trying to keep any contacts in this damned town. They’re always being mixed up. What sort of crowd did you have?”
“Ghastly.” Gin sat down on the couch and propped her feet up, taking a long comfortable puff. “It was a married couple with a kid and an old lady who kept saying, ‘Now, young woman, tell me what I’m going to see!’ Whenever I tried to tell her she’d look over my head with a patient expression.”
“I can just see her. They come in packages.” Flo picked up another stocking and spread her fingers out in the heel. “Gin, I’m fed up. Really.”
“Naturally,” said Gin, as comfortingly as possible.
“No, it isn’t just that. I’ve been thinking over the whole situation. I’ve been here since the beginning of the Detour: I’ve had three years of it. Where am I? What have I got out of it?”
“What have you got?” Gin smiled and watched the smoke. “Oh, you’ve got a swell Navajo belt.”
“Yes, a belt and a half dozen shirts I wouldn’t dream of wearing if they weren’t part of the uniform, and a lot of silver junk that I’m sick of looking at. I’d sell it if I didn’t need it for the effect.”
“But of course there’s the experience. Many a girl of your age is hanging around in New York or Chicago trying to catch a husband so she can stop playing the typewriter eight hours a day. This is fun. Honestly it is: think of the city, and the dirt!”
“Experience.” Flo pronounced it carefully, with a burlesque tone of rapture. “You like that word. It’s the same thing as adventure, isn’t it?”
“Just about.”
“Yeah. I used to have ideas about adventure, too.”
“Oh, you’re old and weary. Forget it.”
“No, I’m telling you an idea. I think that adventure isn’t worth a damn unless you can talk about it afterwards. It’s all in the story. I know.”
“Well, go ahead and tell the story. Who’s stopping you?”
“Who wants to hear it? The couriers don’t want to hear about it; they have the same thing every day. I can’t talk to the dudes about it. They just want to hear how many Indians are born every year.”
“Or if the couriers aren’t Mexican, really. Or how many stamps to use on letters to Chicago. Well, tell your friends. They enjoy it.”
“What friends? I haven’t any.”
Gin was tired of it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Flo. Snap out of it.”
“But I haven’t. Who on earth would take the trouble to go on being a friend of any of us when we’re always leaving town? It takes too much energy. As soon as I make a dinner date the office deadheads me to Albuquerque to wait for some railroad official who’s taking a free vacation to the canyon or something. People get tired of that. No one ever asks me for bridge any more. I never have time to write letters: I don’t even feel like it. I bet a soldier gets just this way, living in training camp.... The only people I ever see in any connected way are the other girls and the drivers and the Indians. And the nigger in the lavatory on the Chief, when I’m on the trains.” She broke off the thread and rolled up two stockings. “We’re pathetic figures. Don’t you realize it? I’ve been realizing it all day.”
“Have it your own way,” said Gin. “In my artless fashion I thought I was enjoying myself, but have it your own way. Have a drink.”
“I don’t care if I do.”
Gin went into the kitchen, knelt down before a cabinet that was shrouded in a cretonne curtain, and pulled out a glass keg of corn liquor. She poured out two small glasses and went back to the living room.
Flo tasted hers and said again, “I’m fed up.” Gin watched her curiously and felt a little depressed. Sometimes she too had a feeling of hopelessness; it was probably the same thing now with Flo. Were they coming to her more often lately? Would she too become chronically tired and aggrieved? How long before she began to indulge in that dangerous game of wondering what it was all about? She drank the corn thoughtfully, thinking about her first days here. It had all been fun, but most especially, she remembered the party the old girls had given for the new, when they had begun to tell their favorite stories about dudes. There was the girl who gave them the list of W. C.’s available for every trip, and made them practice how to ask the gentlemen if they needed them.
“You don’t really need to say anything to them. You just say to the nearest woman in a loud whisper, ‘Would you like to...?’ and they’ll watch where you go, if they have any sense.”
Then there had been the last lecture, when Mr. God gave them a little talk on the aims of the company and ended his address with a delicate plea for—well, for what? Sobriety and morality, probably. What he said was, “I need hardly add that we assume that every girl is alady, in the best sense of the word....”
They had giggled at that, all the way back to the apartment. Itwasfun, the whole idea; tearing over the countryside all day and not knowing every evening where you would be the next night. Flo was tired, that was all: it would pass——
“We might cut up tonight,” she said aloud. “There’s a new movie isn’t there? Or would you like to hire a car and go out of town somewhere? Come on, let’s do that.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Flo grumbled. “It costs too much. I don’t know if I’ll last till next pay day as it is. I tell you, though, we might get dressed up and eat at the hotel instead of fixing something here.”
“Yes, that wouldn’t be bad. Is there any hot water? Oh, wait a minute.” The phone was ringing: she ran to answer it and called back, “Flo, it’s Tom and he says it’s going to be moonlight. He and Wally want us to go up the canyon for a picnic. Should I tell him we’ll fix the supper?”
Flo frowned, as usual, and protested. “But there’s nothing in the house....”
“Now, don’t be that way. We can send for something. It’ll do us good. Come on.”
“Oh, all right. Who’s going?”
“Just us and the cowboys. Tom says he can have the horses here by seven. Hurry and make up your mind, he’s waiting.”
“It’s all right with me.” She hesitated, struggling with her woe, then hurried into the kitchen and started to slice bread.
They were well on the way by the time the moon appeared over a dip in the range of hills to the east. The night air was warm; in the moonlit darkness their shadows were grotesquely different in size. Tom’s hat was the largest thing about him; it swept in a beautiful curve above his sharp face. He rode ahead of the others, glancing around to talk to Flo, who followed stiff and a little ill at ease in the saddle, perpetually thinking and talking of her horse. Gin and Wally rode side by side, but Wally was immense and the horse he rode was also immense: when Gin said anything to him she had to look up. She didn’t say much: Wally was in a reminiscent mood and kept the conversation going without any help.
“I mind at one of the shows at Cheyenne,” he said, “the judges was just beginning to catch on the wild cow milking trick. I won out because they caught everybody else.”
“What is the trick? I never heard of it.”
“No, they don’t do it no more. You’ve got to show milk in the bottle to win: the first one who gets to the stand with milk in the bottle wins the money. The boys used to carry milk right along with them, in the bottle, in their pocket, and make a few motions at the cow with it and then run along to the judges’ stand. It was just a race really. This time the judges was watching out and they felt the bottles and the milk was cold so that let them out.”
“And yours wasn’t cold?”
“Oh no,” said Wally. “I’d been carrying the milk in my mouth: it was right warm. That was the only money I took at that show.”
The creaking of the saddles and the mixed beat of the horses’ hoofs added to a peaceful rhythm of night noises. Passing a farmyard, a little black dog darted out with fierce yaps and Gin’s horse jumped nervously and started to trot. The other three fell into the stride; gathering speed, they cantered up a rise in the road and swung around a bend into the canyon itself. A light breeze met them. Gin closed her eyes, giving herself up to the feeling. She was thinking about Teddy. It was a good thing she had managed to get out of the house tonight. She’d been spending too many evenings waiting for him to call up.
“Probably this is one of the evenings he’ll decide to call,” she thought, and tried to be glad that she wouldn’t be there to answer the phone. “When I see him again I’ll tell him I was in town, and that’ll show him that I don’t always wait for him.” But would it do any good? Would it have any effect, and if so, what effect did she want it to have? She couldn’t figure out how she felt about him. He exasperated her: she always made up her mind to quarrel with him next time she saw him—perhaps a quarrel would break down his easy, lazy indifference to everything—and then when she saw him, she always forgot. It was only when she wasn’t with him that she was so exasperated. Silly to feel anything about him at all. They didn’t know each other very well: they hardly ever saw each other. She wondered whether to speak to Flo about it. But Flo had no use for the Camino crowd at all: she refused to consider them human. “Nuts,” she called them, and forgot all about them.
The soft ceaseless flow of words from Wally and the loping horses pushed Gin into an exaltation, after a little. She was part of the Western world at last: not the West of the daytime where people brushed their teeth and went to offices, but the real West that existed in the fifteen-cent magazines on drugstore racks and the old films that were shown at the theatre Saturday nights.
Baldy slowed down suddenly to a walk, stopped by the horses ahead of him. They all hesitated a moment, then followed Tom’s lead and turned down a path that led to the canyon river.
“I remember a good place along here,” he said, and they splashed and waded to a flat plot of ground with a few bushes leaning over from the slope. Here they swung off and tied the horses, gathering a few small logs and sticks.
“We brought coffee,” Wally said, “so as to have a fire.” They had brought something else too: a bottle of milky liquor that Tom claimed was tequila.
Gin disagreed on principle. “You’re crazy. There never is any tequila in Santa Fé. Every time some bootlegger goes wrong on his gin he sells the batch to cowboys and calls it tequila.”
“I brought it myself from Juarez,” said Tom. “It ain’t gin. If you don’t want it, pass it up. I can use it.”
Flo said bravely, “Well, I’ll try it. I need something new to get cheered up. I don’t care what it is. If I get sick they’ll have to let me off the trip tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Gin, “I didn’t say I didn’t want it. Hand it over.”
They munched sandwiches and cake in silence. Gin tasted the drink and silently admitted that she was wrong. It might not be tequila, but it was something very strange. It had a chilling effect at first, and after each swallow settled down in her stomach like a stubborn little lump of lead before it seemed to melt and spread. The others finished the food before she noticed: there were only three limp jelly sandwiches left.
“You made them,” said Flo, unkindly. “Eat ’em. I told you not to. Have more coffee.”
“She don’t want coffee,” Tom interposed. “Give her the bottle.”
Flo said in a discouraged tone, “It’s having no effect whatever. I thought I could get happy tonight and forget my troubles, but I’m just the same, only worse.”
“It always acts like that when you set out for a good one,” said Wally. “One night last year I started out for a three-day party and I kept going all night and went to bed in the morning cold sober.”
“It’s a strange life,” Gin suddenly said. She hugged her knees and rocked backward, staring at the sky. “People trying to make themselves crazy with bottles of poison, when everything is all right as it is.”
“What’s that?” Wally looked worried.
“It’s a strange life,” she repeated. “Everything is peculiar. Don’t you think so? Really, don’t you?”
Flo sighed audibly. “Leave her alone; she’s off again.”
“But it is,” Gin persisted. A messianic zeal possessed her: she must convey the message in her soul or die unappeased. The moon, the bushes, the beautiful silent horses, all waited with an understanding patience while she spoke to these scoffers. “It is,” she said again. “Here I am sitting by a fire out in the middle of Nature, wearing pants and drinking tequila. I mean here I am, and ten years ago—five years ago—I was living in cities and wearing skirts and now here I am. It’s wonderful.”
“That’s all right,” said Tom. “Of course it’s wonderful.”
“It’s so peculiar. Can’t you see?” Her eyes filled with tears; her soul filled with a passionate sensibility of life and all its lovely factors; the moon, the fire, the horses.... She stretched out on the ground and put her head on her arm, thinking it over.
Tom rose to his feet, leaned over her, and pulled her gently by the arm. “Come on, Gin. Come on back to town with me and we’ll get some more funny thoughts.”
She stumbled after him in the dark and let him untie the horse and help her up to the saddle. They cantered most of the way home; as they swung through the narrow streets at the edge of town she peered through the windows, catching quick flashes of lit rooms with quiet women sewing, or standing at stoves, or washing dishes. Suddenly she felt desolate and lonely, envious of these people who had homes and dull quiet duties.
Tom waved her in to the living-room while he led the horses to the corral. “You wait there and think about life.”
She sat on his camp cot and reflected. It was a big bare room, with a bearskin and a beaded vest on the wall for decoration. There was a table with a Victrola and several bottles, and on the window-sill there were stacks of the little fifteen-cent magazines with pictures on them of bucking broncos and cheering cowboys in furry chaps. The last of the West was here, in these dude-wranglers with their tall stories and their horses. Now she was sad with a tender melancholy, and somewhat sleepy. What were they all looking for here in the mountains? Why did they come? She shook her head.
“Now,” said Tom in the doorway. “What’s it all about?” He handed her a glass. “You ought to feel better with this,” he said. He sat down next to her on the bed and put his arm around her. “What’s eating you?” he asked gently. “Tell me about it and you’ll feel better.”
Her face buried in his shoulder, she answered, “Nothing. I feel sleepy. I’m all right.”
“Sure nothing’s the matter?”
Again she shook her head.
“Well,” he said, “I think there is. You don’t come around as much as you used to. You’ve been running around with that funny crowd, the queer ones.”
“Why, Tom!” With exaggerated indignation, she sat erect and stared at him.
“Sure you are. I saw you at the show the other night with Madden.”
“He’s not queer,” she protested.
“He ain’t? Then I don’t know anything about queer ones. Take your medicine there.”
An hour or so passed in jerks; quick lovely spaces of time with the Victrola playing and short horrible periods that dragged on for years, when she relapsed into stupidity and stared at the beaded vest and tried not to talk about life. She saw Tom once in a while, as it were, looking at her and grinning in a monotonous way: she leaned against his shoulder in an unpleasant spell of dizziness, and it was there that Flo found her when she came stamping in with Wally. She heard Flo’s sharp voice.
“Look at that! Did you ever? We’d better get a taxi.” And in the car that crept through the dark streets she sat up suddenly and said, “Well, I seem to have done it instead of you.”
“You did,” said Flo. “Lie down.”
“I’m all right.” She sat up and tried to put off her remorse until next morning. “Where are the boys?”
“I made them stay at the stable. It’s too late for them to come out.”
“What time is it?”
“Three o’clock, I think.”
The house was squat and ominous in the dark; the moon had long since set. Gin crept to bed by the light of the reading-lamp; she felt somehow that the bright light would outrage the hour. Her head felt very light. It wouldn’t next day.
“Flo,” she called across the room, after she had settled down. There was something to talk over with Flo. What was it? Too much trouble....
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! What is it?”
“I’m perfectly sober,” Gin said. There was no challenge and she continued, “But just the same, life’s peculiar.”
Mary and the camp-chair sank down together for two inches. Then the chair squeaked and stopped giving in: it stayed where it was in space, poised above the throng of Santo Domingo Indians and dusty crabby tourists like a throne, disregarded on the pueblo roof.
“Well,” she continued, when she was sure the chair had come to rest, “I do know that I’m at my wits’ ends. I’m desperate.” Casually, she drew a handkerchief out of her raffia bag and folded it over her nose, against the dust.
Bob answered, “You wait until you’ve talked to Lucy Parker. Don’t give up hope at this stage. There’s such good material in the boy; you mustn’t give up hope.” He felt that he hadn’t said quite enough, but he was tired. Mary was exactly like a sack when she was in a crowd, he thought a little furtively: limp and useless. Dragging Mary and a camp-chair was very fatiguing. His eyes hurt in the sun but he fought against the impulse to put on the sun-glasses in his vest pocket. Mary looked so odd in hers.
From the plaza beneath there came a confused roaring: a mixture of singing and soft-beating drums where the Indians were dancing to the music of the chorus, heavily overlaid and swamped by a loud conversation going on between people squatting before the house. Bob craned his neck to see over the heads of the Indians who blocked the view. He was trying to find Teddy.
“It’s Blake’s fault,” said Mary, understanding him. “He’s always running off like that: this time he’s taken Teddy with him. It’s very rude of him. I must speak to him again.” She readjusted the handkerchief and settled the glasses on her nose. “This dust. I think he’s a schizoid personality, don’t you? I spoke to Brill about him. If I sell that Patterson property perhaps I might have him analyzed. But he seems so prejudiced against it, and I don’t want to force the child. What do you think?”
“Brill? Analysis is a wonderful thing. Yes, that might help.” He broke off and waved violently. “There’s Lucy now. Lucy! Confound these drums. There, she’s coming over.” He settled back in relief. He was never at his best with a surrounding audience of less than three or four. He loved people and more people; the more the better. There was no limit to his capacity for company; if he should ever have to live completely alone he would go mad. The frantic boredom that had possessed him with Mary grew more peaceful; slowly and completely died as he watched Lucy pushing a way toward the ladder that leant against their roof. She was followed by her daughter Phyllis and her daughter Phyllis’ friend Janie Peabody. Good! Soon there would be activity and noise on the roof around him, and other people would look up to the chattering crowd and say to each other, “That’s Bob Stuart.”
The three women climbed the ladder carefully, with upheld skirts and cautious feeling of the toes.
“Ah-h-h, Lucy,” said Bob lovingly, lending a hand at the last rung. “Phyllis. Miss Peabody. Lucy darling, we were just talking about you. You are to tell Mrs. Lennard everything you know about the California school. She wants to find a school for Blake—you know, Blake.”
“My school?” Lucy sat down cross-legged on the roof and lit a cigarette. “Certainly. Tell me if you want it and I’ll write you a letter tonight. I should think it would be just the thing for you. Phyllis was such a problem before I sent her there. They always are difficult at a certain age, don’t you think?” She turned and flicked an ash at Phyllis, who ignored her by chatting with Janie.
The singing fell to an abrupt end and in the silence shuffling feet were heard. Over an array of backs, fidgeting sweaty backs, they saw green branches jogging, being carried out of the plaza. A fluttering wisp of red shirt moved in the same direction, seen in little jerks as it passed between two fat ladies in khaki hats.
“Oh,” cried Mary, “it’s over, isn’t it? I haven’t really seen anything of it.”
“No, no,” Bob said soothingly. “They start again in a minute. What was all that at your school about psychoanalysis, Lucy? Tell her about it.”
“Won’t she be bored? I always forget the other people may want to watch the dance. It seems impossible that anyone here could be seeing it for the first time. How many times have we seen it, Bob?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say. It’s nothing to what it used to be. I remember a dance at Jemez that I stumbled on by sheer accident. It was in the old days when I was collecting. I was taking a trip to San Ysidro to get a blanket—you could still pick up good things in those days. I was driving with poor old Gertrude and we suddenly turned into the village and there it was. Very shocking.”
Lucy leaned forward and ground out her cigarette against a stone. The sun was paling as if the air had grown suddenly thick. Behind a high yellow sandy cone back of the town, a black cloud peeped.
“Tell us about it,” said Lucy. Down in the plaza the singing swelled triumphantly.
“I couldn’t really. They were having something ceremonial and private—I don’t know just what. There were baskets of fruit and plates of food; the men made obscene gestures with the bananas. Fertility and all that, I suppose. Gertrude was as white as a sheet; she screamed and drove away as fast as she could, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. I was helpless with laughter. You can imagine Gertrude.”
“It’s a wonderful story,” said Lucy. “I should have heard it before. Gertrude never mentioned it to me, but naturally she wouldn’t. Well, Mrs. Lennard....”
The singing stopped again.
“Now is it over?”
“No, that’s just the end of the first clan’s turn. There’ll be a lot more before they call it a day.... It’s a small school; only a hundred or so, and they have a staff psychoanalyst and all the masters really make a specialty ofunderstandingthe students. Very modern, of course—you must see the art work. It’s coeducational but not in any silly communist way. I mean it’s individual. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“I think so. It’s very interesting to me, because Blake is such a special case....”
Lucy nodded deeply. “It’s a school for special cases; that’s the real idea that’s behind it all. The woman who founded it is wonderful. I’ll give you a letter for her. Oh, look, there’s Teddy. Teddy!” She scrambled up and stood on tiptoe, waving. “Of course he’ll never be able to hear me with all this noise.” The singers were chanting in a high falsetto.
“He’s too busy with the courier, mother,” said Phyllis. “He can’t hear you over all those people. Well, my dear, he was quite angry with me. Have you ever seen him really angry?”
“Never,” said Janie.
“I was almost frightened,” said Phyllis. “Of course I don’t really care what he thinks of me, but it was unpleasant for a few minutes. Tell me what you heard about him in New York.”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything definite. They talk so in New York, I think. They always say the same thing. I just heard that he gives terribly amusing parties, my dear, with all of that crowd. And no one is quite sure about him because he’s seen with people like that all the time: of course no one thinks anything of it any more, and I do think that if a person is amusing I don’t think a person’s private life ought to have anything to do with it, but what I heard was.”
“This atmosphere is simply marvelous for young people,” Lucy was telling Mary. “The combination of healthy outdoor life and the peculiar feeling one gets out here of history—the Spaniards, and the Western pioneers, and all that. And the wonderful Indian culture. They imbibe something. Everybody here is so unusually appreciative, haven’t you found it so?”
“The only flaw is that we’re getting to be so famous,” Bob added. “It’s ruining the place. I wish the authorities would pass a law prohibiting all these buses and trippers and outsiders. Nothing kills a place as much as the outsiders.”
“I feel the same way,” said Lucy. “I’m afraid I’m really snobbish about all those visitors. What can they get out of it?”
Jane was saying, “But I’m just going to hold out with what I have until I get back East. You can’t tell what people are going to be wearing this fall until you look around. It doesn’t matter so much here, but....”
“Do you see Blake anywhere, Bob?” said Mary.
“Don’t worry, he’ll turn up at the car. He doesn’t seem to be with Madden just now.”
The crowd was growing sparse. Over the hill beyond the houses cars were leaving in streams, each one silhouetted against the green sky before it crossed the mound and disappeared. As the day faded the land grew wider, more desolate. Under the threatening rain-heavy sky it looked parched and ferocious. Irritated squawks of automobile horns mingled with the thrumming singing voices in the plaza.
Lucy looked down at the people who were hurrying to the cars. “There’s Isobel. How very badly she dresses. Have you heard what they’re saying about her engagement? Gwen was telling me....”
“Mother says I can go in August if I insist,” said Phyllis. “I’m not sure I want to go at all: it’s a very dull season, I believe.”
“Oh, youlucky.”
Now there were such a few people left that Blake was in sight, leaning against a ladder at the far corner of the plaza and gazing ahead of him in a bemused way. The dancers were filing out, going in a listless straggling line to the kiva beyond a row of irregularly outlined houses on the other side. The sun was setting behind the clouds and in a few minutes the prayer for rain would be answered. A fresh damp wind was blowing down upon the village.
Green branches and dry rattles carried by the koshare. They walked slowly, now that their work was done, towards the kiva. Beyond the houses they came into sight again, climbing the hard white steps to the roof, pausing against that green sky as they started down the ladder into the round little house. Red shirts and blue shirts followed with the drums, and a low singing went with them.
“But as Gwen says,” Lucy finished, “there are times when Isobel is so vague that God knows what really did happen.She’llnever tell the real story.”
Mary stood up and put her glasses back into her bag.
“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “A most beautiful picture. Absolutely inspiring.”
Again evening had overtaken Santa Fé before anything happened. Every morning Blake woke with a furious desire to get out of the house and down to town, so that he would not miss anything. He never knew what it was that he expected, and day after day developed into the same uneventful solar round. Nevertheless every morning brought with it a tense expectation, a silent waiting.
Tonight he wondered fretfully why the fever was not allayed. It had been a full day, exciting and tiring. The whole town was tired. The drums were still beating in his ears: when he closed his eyes he tried to see the rows of stamping people and the waving branches: but instead he kept thinking of the crowds that filled the villageplaza; old ladies in felt hats sitting on the roofs, their fat legs dangling over, their fat hands waving to other old ladies on the opposite roofs....
“Missing so much and so much,” he murmured, and felt a little revenged.
And the keen young people so greatly to be envied, who knew everything—hatless, collar-less, sparsely bearded young men with folded arms and languid looks; wispy, eager young women; officious, anxious, sweating couriers in jangling silver. And the broad khaki backs of the motor tourists. Around and between them the frantic, shocking, stunning leaps of the ghost-men appearing through the gaps. The drumming in his ears; he was shaken and irritated and cheated: he wanted to cry.
“But our lot crawls between dry ribs to keep its metaphysics warm.” Did that have anything to do with it? “Always the appropriate thing.” In a gust of fury he kicked a pebble far up the pavement, spinning and skipping.
The waiting was not satisfied. Perhaps he was not, after all, the only one to feel that way. The plaza, dark in the centre but lighted around the sidewalk, was full of people looking for something. It was a small plaza, insufficient for so many prowling people, walking round and round.
In the shadows of the north side he found Madden, lounging on a bench and more or less waiting for him.
“We’ll have to go to the cafe,” he said, as Blake came up. “Everything else is jammed. I’m not hungry, are you?”
“No. I ate dust all day. Did you smell that jerked meat?”
“Oh, that. You’ll get used to that.”
They crossed the plot of grass and elbowed through the procession on the walk. The cafe was crowded too. Only half disappointed, they loitered at the door, peering in at the restaurant until they drew a hail from Harvey and Gin, who had a booth.
“Come on over,” Harvey said. “Plenty of room.” Gin gathered her skirts and edged to the wall invitingly. Blake glowered at her, representative as she was of the whole jostling day.
“I saw you there,” she told him, “looking very fierce. I’m sorry. You might have pitied me a little, and you didn’t. I know you didn’t: I see it in your eye.” She smiled teasingly and he felt a little mollified.
Harvey moved his knife and fork to make room for Blue Plate Number Three, and said, “What’re you kids doing tonight? We’re looking for excitement. Come along? I’ve got the car.”
Teddy suggested the movies. Blake demurred; he tried to explain that he had wasted far too many of his evenings in the movies, but the others didn’t understand. He couldn’t tell them that the evenings would be rare and strange and historical if they could only manage them properly. Defeated, he followed them to the theatre and watched an ancient railroad cinema.
Oddly enough, it was Harvey who was tainted by his discontent. As they straggled into the street afterwards he said:
“It’s always the same thing. Let’s get out of the old town. Let’s....” he paused.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Gin said. “There’s nothing else.”
Certainly there was some surcease in going fast and having nothing to do. Blake sat on the back of the seat, perched on the rolled-up top; the wind was strong with a little bite to it, and he closed his ears and tried to listen without seeing. It was almost perfect. The little lurch his body gave for no apparent reason—that would be a curve in the road. The roaring in his ears that came and went and came again—that must be a canyon. The louder the hum of the car, and a slowing-down of wind that was a hill, and there was a scent the wind that could not be anything but pines growing on the mountain side. Now they turned off on a rough road; he swayed and would have fallen if he had not opened his eyes.
Madden saved him by grabbing his arm; they called to Harvey to go easy.
“We’re trying to find our way,” Gin shouted over her shoulder. “We’re lost.”
“I know that already. Say, for Christ’s sake....” Madden stopped and seized the side of the car as a bump almost threw him out. Blake slid down to the floor with a jerk, and the engine stopped of its own fatigue.
“Something’s wrong,” said Harvey. “Something certainly is wrong.” He got out and stooped down in front. “High centre. We’ll have to dig out. I’m glad I brought the shovel. Where are we anyway?”
No one knew. It was late and getting cold: they huddled down in blankets and decided to wait for the moon before trying to get out.
“This is better than town, anyway,” Gin said.
Madden cried indignantly, “What do you mean, anyway? This isgreat. Look at the stars.”
It was very quiet. Closing their eyes, they tried to stop shivering. Harvey searched in the side-pockets and found a half bottle of corn, which helped a little. In a sentimental voice, Gin began to sing:
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall When on the world a mist began to fall....
The others joined in, howling away in a canine ecstasy of grief. They were silent afterwards, revelling in a misty regret. Then Madden began,
Tu eres Lupita divina,Como los rayos del sol.
Tu eres Lupita divina,Como los rayos del sol.
Tu eres Lupita divina,
Como los rayos del sol.
Blake hummed along with him, filling in the gaps in his memory with an ambiguous gibberish. Harvey contributed,
She’d a dark and roving eye,And her hair hung down in ringlets,Anicegirl, adecentgirl (here his voice cracked)But one of the rakish kind.
She’d a dark and roving eye,And her hair hung down in ringlets,Anicegirl, adecentgirl (here his voice cracked)But one of the rakish kind.
She’d a dark and roving eye,
And her hair hung down in ringlets,
Anicegirl, adecentgirl (here his voice cracked)
But one of the rakish kind.
Then they had “Lord Geoffrey Amherst,” and in spite of many protests, Gin sang doggedly to the end of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
To the east there was a pale white glow in the sky, outlining the hills. Blake saw a glimpse of the moon. He cried out his discovery, and the heavy white ball lifted into the sky to the accompaniment of four fresh young voices rising out of the valley, chanting,
“God bless the bastard king of dear old England.”
They stirred themselves and began to dig in the sand. After a while they freed the car and it seemed to work all right. Harvey backed it out and retraced his wheel-tracks to the edge of the main road.
“Now where?”
“Anywhere,” said Madden, waving grandly. “Out into the world.” He hoisted himself up to the back again: Gin followed suit in the front seat, and the three balancing figures jogged and reeled as Harvey drove on toward Taos. It was almost as light as day. They passed one other machine: driving on in the path of the headlight glow they waved and shrieked until a curve cut it off. Blake drummed with his heels on the leather cushion in a burst of exhilaration.
They left the main road and followed the way to Frijoles Canyon. The car went slower, going through rivers with a cautious swoop and turning corners on all four wheels. Long shadows lay across the silver-splashed fields. It seemed impossible that all the light could be coming from the moon, that was now only a little ball swimming in clouds up toward the centre of the sky. Everything but the car was motionless and asleep. Houses with blank dead eyes crouched by the road. No dogs ran out to race with the wheels.
Blake sank back into the corner of the seat. His head dropped: the shadows blurred and the sound of the engine was more stupefying than silence. He reached with stiff fingers for a blanket, curled up in it and fell into a sort of sleep, his elbows braced against shock. In his dream he was still in the car, riding steadily through the river at school or across baked yellow plains, arguing with Dr. Miller. Sometimes he jerked and waked up, glanced worriedly at Gin’s head against the cushion ahead of him, and closed his eyes again. The night was fading.
The car stopped and he woke up completely. He sat up, blinking, and stared at Madden, who was kneeling by the ditch and fishing in the water with a hat.
“What is it?”
“We need water,” Gin explained. Her bare knees were propped up over the door, and she powdered her nose vigorously. “We couldn’t find anything to use for it. I hope that’s not your hat?”
“No,” he assured her. “It’s been kicking around in this car for a long time, I think.”
Making no effort to climb out, he watched Harvey pour what water he still had after crossing the road into the radiator. Sullen and efficient, the other two climbed back and sat still. They all looked drowsily at the sky. The moon had faded from silver to white: down on the earth the glow had disappeared and there was no colour anywhere in the rocks. Everything was black or white or grey.
“Like a steel engraving,” said Teddy, “but much more so.”
They were in a jumble of rock, chalky-white rock that was broken off in great chunks and piled up into mountains. The ditch emptied into a river that crossed the road farther down and crept off into a ravine of thick-growing juniper, black in the thin light.
Gin blurted, “It looks awful. I hate being in canyons.”
They agreed not to drive any more. Blake suggested climbing something. They aimlessly picked out a hill and began to crawl up the side, leaving the car somewhat askew in the road. It was easy to get half-way up; there the climb grew steep and difficult. For a little while no one said anything; they worked in deep silence, holding out their hands to help each other whenever they could. When they climbed over the last boulder, they were puffing. They walked to a ledge that faced the east and sat down to wait for the sun, shivering in the wind.
Gin sighed ponderously, lay down with her arm under her head, and went to sleep. Harvey curled up next to her with his arm protectingly over her head. He snored and rubbed his cheek softly against the rock.
“I wonder what time it is,” Teddy said to Blake. “I’ve never felt more awake.”
They sat in silence for a time that felt like a century. Their legs hung over the sharp edge of the flat hilltop. Blake kicked softly against the rock and a fine powder sifted down.
“This is swell,” he said.
“You bet.”
He looked at the cruel edges of the hills and the shadows between them, sinking deeper and deeper in the clefts, and he thought,
“I have only two months.” He pushed the shadowy hills out of his mind and thought of the train-ride East, the smell of rooms that had been closed all summer with school books locked up inside, the first classes with roll-calls and reading lists in mimeographed sheets. He felt a little nauseated.
“Mother says I’ve got to go to some school in September,” he said aloud. Before him were the hills again, and Teddy sitting next to him.
“Oh, well,” said Teddy, “start worrying in September. This is July.”
“That’s only two months. I won’t go, that’s all. I won’t.”
“Well, don’t. Don’t ever do anything you don’t want to do. Look at me.”
“Yes, but you’re different. No family.”
Teddy was silent a minute and then said, “That’s so. It shouldn’t make any difference, though, if you really know what you want.”
“But I don’t. Does anybody? Do you? I just know what I don’t want. I’ll blow up if I go back to school.”
“Sure, I know what I want. I want....” he hesitated, chewing on a pine-needle. “I want time to work in peace, and a chance to see new places. I guess I want money. That would fix things. Then I could really do everything I haven’t time for.”
“What sort of places would you like to see? India?”
“Yes, and some of Europe, and North Africa. I’ve always wanted to paint in Algeria.”
Feeling guilty, Blake said, “Oh, I’ve been there. It’s not so wonderful.”
“You’ve been there?” said Teddy angrily. “Why, you lucky little fool.”
“But of course I’ve been there. Mother had to go for her health, and of course....”
Madden, oddly excited, shook his fist at the air. “Of course, of course, of course. You people who say ‘of course.’”
Blake stared at him, mystified. For a cold moment he thought that perhaps Madden hated him. Then everything seemed to calm down: Teddy laughed and spit the pine-needle down between his dangling feet.
“Come with me when I go away, then,” he said, “and see if you can get a kick out of that.”
“When?” Blake was eager.
“Oh, I don’t know. September’s a good time. Call it September. We’ll drive somewhere.” He shook his head and laughed again. “I’m getting nutty. How can I dig myself out of this hole? Damned cesspool.” He closed his eyes against the black and white panorama and went to sleep.
The sky was getting red. In a minute there would be a sunrise: Blake tried to concentrate on it. People never saw the sunrise: people ought to look oftener at sunrises. Even one a month would be better than none at all. Some day he would change the system and live at night: he would finish his day with a sunrise and then go to bed immediately.
Like this. Was it going to be red-orange, or gold? The clouds across the sky, on the other side, were beginning to flush near the sun. Where was the sun? Everything was waiting for it. Somewhere a few miles farther east there must be someone looking at it right now. All day there were sunrises somewhere in the world. A few hours ago there had been one in Algeria, and none of the people in the hotel there would have seen it. There would be a few servants coming to work in white robes growing pink in the red light. But here on this rock in New Mexico one person would watch it. Blake Lennard Watches Sunrise. He pulled his feet up and lay down facing east.
Suddenly the sun was there, but the four huddled bodies on the high rock did not move.